WHEN GARRISON KEILLOR HAS HAD ENOUGH.

The kind of Excessively Earnest cosmopolitan who wants language to be sensitive, you know, the kind of person who kept listening to Prairie Home Companion after it got really stale, really shouldn't be tone-policing language.

[T]here are language vigilantes roaming the land and some of them carry a noose and know where they can find a scaffold.

A friend who is a Unitarian minister tells me that her church demands that she submit her sermons two weeks in advance "to make sure there are no problems" — apparently, the problem is that she has used the word "fellowship," which raised concerns on the church board, some members preferring the term "community," "fellowship" seeming too masculine.

Fellowship is the friendliness of people united in a faith. My Episcopal church has a woman rector and assistant rector and I feel fellowship with them. I don't feel community, any more than I'd address a male friend as "My good fellow" — — I'm not P.G. Wodehouse, I'm an American.

That's not a Unitarian congregation, that's a communist cell. But I digress.

When liberal New York Unitarians decide to censor their clergy, you know we're in serious serious trouble. Pretty soon the Freemans and Trumans and Petersons and Olsons will need to degender themselves and then how shall we make Los Angeles not threatening to agnostics? St. Paul will have to change its name to East Minneapolis. And why do we keep the name America, honoring the navigator Amerigo Vespucci who sailed our coasts and thought he was in Asia? Do we know for a fact that the man dealt fairly with indigenous peoples? No, we do not. Out it goes, and Columbia too, and Washington, for all I care.

That's as close to a "stuff it" as you're going to get from Pastor Inkvist.